April 09, 2006

What Is Happening At The WaPo?

If an editorial can induce aneurysms, the Washington Post may have killed or wounded a significant slice of left-leaning America with their effort on Sunday - in "A Good Leak" they both defend Libby's leak of the NIE to Judy Miller and beat on Joe Wilson. Since they also buried a seemingly-significant story about who at the White House knew what and when on the Niger-uranium question, we wonder if there has been a Ben Domenech-inspired coup at the WaPo. [A more serious defense of the WaPo is here - basically, Woodward, Pincus, and the editors have insider knowledge about who leaked and why.]

First, their praise of the leak, with emphasis added:

A Good LeakPresident Bush declassified some of the intelligence he used to decide on war in Iraq. Is that a scandal?

PRESIDENT BUSH was right to approve the declassification of parts of a
National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq three years ago in order to
make clear why he had believed that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear
weapons. Presidents are authorized to declassify sensitive material,
and the public benefits when they do. But the administration handled
the release clumsily, exposing Mr. Bush to the hyperbolic charges of
misconduct and hypocrisy that Democrats are leveling.

...There was nothing illegal or even particularly unusual about that; nor
is this presidentially authorized leak necessarily comparable to other,
unauthorized disclosures that the president believes, rightly or
wrongly, compromise national security. Nevertheless, Mr. Cheney's
tactics make Mr. Bush look foolish for having subsequently denounced a
different leak in the same controversy and vowing to "get to the
bottom" of it.

Wow. Of course, these are presumably the same editors hyping the "punish Wilson" excerpt from the Fitzgerald filing, so go figure.

LOTS of reaction at Memeorandum; I may scout a few lefty sites to perform a body count, but let me try to anticipate their outrage on the Wilson segment. To do that I have to take the unaccustomed role of Joe Wilson apologist, but here we go:

Mr. Wilson originally claimed in a 2003 New York Times op-ed and in
conversations with numerous reporters that he had debunked a report
that Iraq was seeking to purchase uranium from Niger and that Mr.
Bush's subsequent inclusion of that allegation in his State of the
Union address showed that he had deliberately "twisted" intelligence
"to exaggerate the Iraq threat." The material that Mr. Bush ordered declassified established, as have
several subsequent investigations, that Mr. Wilson was the one guilty
of twisting the truth. In fact, his report supported the conclusion
that Iraq had sought uranium.

Well, per the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report from July 2004, it is true that there were aspects of his report that supported that conclusion, since Wilson noted an Iraqi overture from 1999 that may have been related to uranium. However, his report was considered inconclusive. From the report:

Conclusion 13. The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq.

Let's go back to the editorial:

Mr. Wilson subsequently claimed that the White House set out to punish
him for his supposed whistle-blowing by deliberately blowing the cover
of his wife, Valerie Plame, who he said was an undercover CIA
operative. This prompted the investigation by Special Counsel Patrick
J. Fitzgerald. After more than 2 1/2 years of investigation, Mr.
Fitzgerald has reported no evidence to support Mr. Wilson's charge.

As much as I agree, this editorial is appearing in the very same paper that reported this on Saturday, in the lead:

As he drew back the curtain this week on the evidence against Vice
President Cheney's former top aide, Special Counsel Patrick J.
Fitzgerald for the first time described a "concerted action" by
"multiple people in the White House" -- using classified information --
to "discredit, punish or seek revenge against" a critic of President
Bush's war in Iraq.

Fitzgerald's brief uses unusually strong language to
rebut this claim. In light of the grand jury testimony, the prosecutor
said, "it is hard to conceive of what evidence there could be that
would disprove the existence of White House efforts to 'punish' Wilson."

My goodness, regular readers of the WaPo risk whiplash. [That said, the WaPo editors surely know who Bob Woodward's source is for his Plame leak; they also must know Walter Pincus' source. So they may have unpublished reasons to be skeptical of the "punishment" theory.] Let's press on:

Mr. Libby's motive in allegedly disclosing her name to reporters, Mr.
Fitzgerald said, was to disprove yet another false assertion, that Mr.
Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Mr. Cheney. In fact Mr. Wilson
was recommended for the trip by his wife.

Devoted Wilso-philes will swoon at the notion that Libby's motive may have been to correct the record. As to the idea that it is a "fact" that Wilson's wife recommended him for the trip, stand back!

Wilson's position has shown admirable flexibility in the face of new facts; here he is chatting with TIME in the famous Matt Cooper article:

In an interview with TIME, Wilson, who served as an ambassador to Gabon
and as a senior American diplomat in Baghdad under the current
president's father, angrily said that his wife had nothing to do with
his trip to Africa. "That is bulls__t. That is absolutely not the
case," Wilson told TIME. "I met with between six and eight analysts and
operators from CIA and elsewhere [before the Feb 2002 trip]. None of
the people in that meeting did I know, and they took the decision to
send me. This is a smear job."

Former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, dispatched by the CIA in
February 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq sought to reconstitute
its nuclear weapons program with uranium from Africa, was specifically
recommended for the mission by his wife, a CIA employee, contrary to
what he has said publicly.

Can't fault the WaPo editors for lack of consistency. Joe Wilson fired back, and it is fair to say this has been a point of contention (some of my thoughts here).

In any case, both Wilson's position and the coverage at TIME have been evolving - here is a TIME account from August 2005:

...That means Wilson was also shading the story: "Valerie had nothing to do
with the matter," he wrote in his 2004 book The Politics of Truth. "She
definitely had not proposed that I make the trip." When asked last week by
TIME if he still denies that she was the origin of his involvement in the trip,
he avoided answering. But he has maintained all along that Administration
officials conducted a "smear job" on him and outed his wife in revenge.

Time to survey the battlefield.

MORE: Odd - Joe Wilson emails SusanG at the Daily Kos, but skips past the spousal question to focus on the schizophrenia at the WaPo. Joe and I, thinking as one - that ought to make at least one of us uncomfortable.

ERiposte and ThinkProgress make me look concise, but add some points. I am going to dispute Think Progress on this:

CLAIM: Wilson said Cheney sent him to Africa “Mr.
Libby’s motive in allegedly disclosing her name to reporters, Mr.
Fitzgerald said, was to disprove yet another false assertion, that Mr.
Wilson had been dispatched to Niger by Mr. Cheney.” [Washington Post, 4/9/06]

FACT:

Wilson never said that Cheney sent him,
only that the vice president’s office had questions about an
intelligence report that referred to the sale of uranium yellowcake to
Iraq from Niger. Wilson, in his New York Times article, said CIA
officials were informed of Cheney’s questions. [Bloomberg, 7/14/05]

Groan - Nick Kristof is hazy on who said it or how it got started, but *someone* asserted that Wilson was sent "at the behest" (Kristof's phrase) of the office of the Vice President, and the White House certainly felt pressured to rebut it. Here, for example, is the fact-proof Chris Matthews insisting repeatedly that Wilson was sent "at the behest" of the VP's office. Perhaps the WaPo editors should have separated the office from the man, but to pretend that the idea was not out there (following, we should note, the Kristof columns (May 6, 2003; June 13, 2003) with Wilson as an anonymous source) is not reasonable.

MORE: And if Wilson did not say Cheney sent him, he ought to ask his publicist to correct his current on-line bio. or maybe the WaPo made their mistake by reading his bio, which says this:

Wilson is now at the center of a major
political maelstrom involving the White House, the C.I.A. and the
second gulf war in Iraq. In 2002, at the request of Vice President Dick
Cheney, Wilson was assigned by the C.I.A. to investigate claims that
Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger for the
purpose of advancing his nuclear program. When his investigation turned
up nothing, Wilson reported back to officials in Washington that there
was no basis for the claims.

Why? Well think about it. The Plame cell within the CIA could have simply claimed that it was the Italians who gave them the information, instead of... say... the French. That way they cover their tracks and implicate the Italians.

Wilson claimed that his CIA contacts told him about the documents in February 2002. Yet the DO reports officers disputed that, and said that they didn't even have any documents at the time.

There is definitely some funny business going on there, which is why the sloppy redacting of the Italians in the SSCI report is so alarming.

Rick Moran does a good job on the backdrop--why did the CIA send Wilson who consistently opposed regime change in Iraq? I'm not sure why he throws TM in the mix of those questioning the editorial, but TM did just not the way Rosen et al who are listed do.

Yeah, I'd like to see eriposte answer why Plame and the CIA sent her husband to Niger twice. Well, I'd like to see eriposte actually bring anything to the table. I have a feeling I won't be needing a plate any time soon.

and dangers of Iraq working on Nukes, and Joe answers the question but mentions nothing about nukes.

yeah, I like how he mocked the previous guys answer too -- Saddams spys-henchmen trying buy bad weaponery? HAH idiots, thats a laugh ! (In that smug, I know Saddam and Iraq better than anyone in the entire world kinda way he does)

This mocking of course comes 7 months after a former Niger official did tell Wilson to his face Baghdad Bob drop into Niger to see if he could buy some yellowcake.

"Wilson is now at the center of a major political maelstrom involving the White House, the C.I.A. and the second gulf war in Iraq. In 2002, at the request of Vice President Dick Cheney, Wilson was assigned by the C.I.A. to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger for the purpose of advancing his nuclear program. When his investigation turned up nothing, Wilson reported back to officials in Washington that there was no basis for the claims."

No one asserts that Cheney did not request that someone be assigned by the CIA to take a jucket to the sun drenched paradise of Niger. The quoted statement does not say that he requested that that someone be Wilson - unless you have an overwhelming desire to read it that way in order to call Wilson a liar. The Niger trip was Cheney's idea - assigning Wilson to be the person to make it was the CIA's.

"No one asserts that Cheney did not request that someone be assigned by the CIA to take a jucket to the sun drenched paradise of Niger. The quoted statement does not say that he requested that that someone be Wilson - unless you have an overwhelming desire to read it that way in order to call Wilson a liar. The Niger trip was Cheney's idea - assigning Wilson to be the person to make it was the CIA's."

Not true at all. Cheney never reqeusted a Niger trip of any kind. IIRC, Cheney got a daily breifing with info in it about Iraq buying yellowcake from Niger and his office asked the CIA what they knew about it. The CIA actually answered back fairly quickly that they didn't think there was anything to it. Then becuase the DOD and State as well as the office of the VP were asking about Niger and yellowcake, the CIA decided on their own iniative (spy agencies do that sometimes) to send sowmeone to Niger and that person turned out to be superspy Joe.

I wish I posted a response to MayBee's cite of Wilson's bio when I first saw it last night, because I was going to predict that left-of-center folks would twist the words like pretzels, trying to convince us that they don't mean what they clearly say. TexasToast would have proved my prediction correct.

On this issue, TexasToast is toast. If the quote had been something like, "In response to a request by Vice President Dick Cheney, Wilson was assigned by the C.I.A. to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger," TT's interpretation might be reasonable; or at least not silly. But "at the request of" doesn't leave much wiggle room. Not to mention, as others have pointed out, even if TT's interpretation were correct, it's still contrary to the fact that Cheney never asked the CIA to send anyone to Niger.

In case anyone missed it, here is a fasinating comment from some time ago by Cecil, showing that the story that Wilson's trip resulted from Cheney's questions is, at best, highly unlikely. It seems the report which inspired the VP's questions was dated Feb. 12, 2002; the same day Plame wrote a memo suggesting her husband for the Niger trip. So either our government is unbelievably efficient, or something else is unbelievable.

Interesting, tops!
The more I was reading his bios/old forum transcripts yesterday, the more surprised I was that the CIA had chosen him. He was definitely a 'realist', not a neo-. But more than that, he was a man working for an international/ME business consulting company- and they didn't ask him to sign a non-disclosure agreement? I don't know what they were thinking.

"No one asserts that Cheney did not request that someone be assigned by the CIA to take a jucket to the sun drenched paradise of Niger. The quoted statement does not say that he requested that that someone be Wilson "

Yes, but they probably would have liked value for money,this sounds like the one they got cheap from the brother-in-law.

The mighty CIA,"Your husband is between jobs Val and we are a bit short staffed at the moment,modest expenses and all the publicity he can handle..don't mention our name".

Why do we have to continually be subjected to Wilson's lies 24/7? First he is on Wolf Blitzer then Keith Olberman's show. Don't they or their bosses realize he is lying accusing Rove of leaking classified info? It was de-classified. Is Joe a moron about the facts?

If the parties were reversed, the democrats would be shouting to the rooftop that Saddam tried to purchase uranium from Niger. There is enough evidence in the public record to support the claim, let alone that which we will never see. Funny how politics work. Especially when it comes to national security.

Something else that struck me as funny today...every word that comes out of Libby's mouth is a lie, unless and until he says something that could damage Bush/Cheney. Then he speaks the truth. ::grin:: I love politics.

"In the late 1980s, the Iraqi representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency—Iraq's senior public envoy for nuclear matters, in effect—was a man named Wissam al-Zahawie."

"In February 1999, Zahawie left his Vatican office for a few days and paid an official visit to Niger, a country known for absolutely nothing except its vast deposits of uranium ore. It was from Niger that Iraq had originally acquired uranium in 1981, as confirmed in the Duelfer Report."

"Time magazine "exclusive" about Zahawie, written by Hassan Fattah on Oct. 1, 2003:

The veteran diplomat has spent the eight months since President Bush's speech trying to set the record straight and clear his name. In a rare interview with Time, al-Zahawie outlined how forgery and circumstantial evidence was used to talk up Iraq's nuclear weapons threat, and leave him holding the smoking gun.

A few paragraphs later appear, the wonderful and unchallenged words from Zahawie: "Frankly, I didn't know that Niger produced uranium at all."

..and the lickspittle cockroaches of the MSM aided and abetted this filthy farrago of lies simply because it suited their political purposes!

...every word that comes out of Libby's mouth is a lie, unless and until he says something that could damage Bush/Cheney.

Every word that comes out of Wilson, Mitchell, Fitzgerald etc. mouths that is highly questionable (and that list keeps getting longer) should be - dismissed, is misspoken, is misquoted, is misattributed, not the "intention", literary flair, open to interpretation and on and on

That could be why Joe Baby kept quiet until he was almost certain there was not going to be any uranium found in Iraq. Otherwise, he would have started his campaign earlier, if he truly didn't believe it had happened. Like in September 2002 when the British released their document. Or in December 2002 when State released theirs. He wasn't sure so he waited until May, when it was pretty obvious we weren't going to find anything.

Was there any discussion today on Rick Moran's posting on Right Wing Nut House. I've read Rick before and he always seems sensible. He seems to think Bush is in trouble for lying to Fitz and obstructing justice. He's taking Jason Leopold as gospel. I thought it might be tongue in cheek, but I don't think so.

Sue,
"The Duelfer Report also cites "a second contact between Iraq and Niger," which occurred in 2001, when a Niger minister visited Baghdad "to request assistance in obtaining petroleum products to alleviate Niger's economic problems." According to the deposition of Ja'far Diya' Ja'far (the head of Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear weapons program), these negotiations involved no offer of uranium ore but only "cash in exchange for petroleum." West Africa is awash in petroleum, and Niger is poor in cash. Iraq in 2001 was cash-rich through the oil-for-food racket,"

I read Rick's take and I don't see how Bush is in trouble.
Bush can know about Wilson/Plame, right? He's the President. That doesn't mean he told someone to tell the press, or expected someone to tell the press, or knows who told the press. Ironically, Fitzgerald knows and isn't pressing charges.

Let the parsing begin--the first graph is that Cheney told Bush in June 2003 that Plame worked at the CIA and ws responsible for Holy Joe's Niger Mission.

It continues:
"This information was provided to this reporter by attorneys and US officials who have remained close to the case. Investigators working with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald compiled the information after interviewing 36 Bush administration officials over the past two and a half years.

The revelation puts a new wrinkle into Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's two-year-old criminal probe into the leak and suggests for the first time that President Bush knew from early on that the vice president and senior officials on his staff were involved in a coordinated effort to attack Wilson's credibility by leaking his wife's classified CIA status.

Now that President Bush's knowledge of the Plame Wilson affair has been exposed, there are thorny questions about whether the president has broken the law - specifically, whether he obstructed justice when he was interviewed about his knowledge of the Plame Wilson leak and the campaign to discredit her husband."

Whie he tries to slip slide it to make it appear the sources are on Fitz' staff, he says they are "attorneys and US officials who have remained close to the case"

Speaking to college students and faculty at California State University Northridge last week, Wilson said that after President Bush cited the uranium claims in his State of the Union address he tried unsuccessfully for five months to get the White House to correct the record.

"I had direct discussions with the State Department, Senate committees," Wilson said during a speech last Thursday. "I had numerous conversations to change what they were saying publicly. I had a civic duty to hold my government to account for what it had said and done."

Wilson said he was rebuffed at every instance and finally decided to write an op-ed in the New York Times and expose the administration for knowingly "twisting" the intelligence on the Iraqi nuclear threat to make a case for war. The op-ed appeared in the newspaper July 6, 2003. Wilson wrote that had he personally traveled to Niger to check out the Niger intelligence and had determined it was bogus.

"Nothing more, nothing less than challenging the government to come clean on this matter," Wilson said. "That's all I did."

In the interest of fairness, any person identified in this story who believes he has been portrayed unfairly or that the information about him is untrue will have the opportunity to respond in this space.

Good grief, Wilson isn't even hiding his Leopold collaboration anymore...sad when this is your only choice huh?

For 5 months, Wilson is running around talking to State and Senate committees and Fitzgerald continues to say that Wilson didn't identify himself until July 6th? By July 6th, everyone in Washington knew who the envoy was.

True, July 6 at the witching hour is preposterous. But I can't for the life of me see why a smart guy like Rick is concerned about this article. It seems no diffewrent that 22 to be indicted or Rove about to be indicted or any of the other stories we've been hearing since last October.

It seems almost coordinated around Fitz's last filing, with the lefty blogs doing a little dance followed by Joe's appearances the last couple of days. The only one out of step is the WaPo - which says enough of this crap.

Interesting. I can't figure Moran's piece out either. Occasionally someone will shoot for irony and miss by a little bit. It sure doesn't tie in to his AT piece this morning.

Kate,
This is the fundamental point of the whole matter,Wilson and Plame are important because they say they are.This is an old trick of the MSM,inflate the status or virtue of the alleged victim to make the "crime" seem more heinous.

I'm utterly baffled.
But then perhaps it's hard for me to see another viewpoint because I've spent so much time reading and analyzing whatever I can about this matter, and it would be hard to see it as other than a serial liar and Clouvert.

Joe-yes, Mary Matalin said that Joe Wilson was 59th of the list of things they were worried about at that time. Really a cipher, an annoyance. A blabbermouth and liar running around spreading falsehoods and he need to be countered, that's all.

Taranto is on a roll today--please note the first sentence:
"Yesterday Kerry was on "Meet the Press," where host Tim Russert neglected to press him on his commitment, on the same show 435 short days ago, to release his military records. But there was this enlightening exchange:

Russert: The Boston Globe, your hometown paper, did an article on this subject. They quoted Don Fowler, the former chairman of the Democratic Committee, and he said in the party, "Many in the party remain upset about Kerry's inability in 2004 to refine his policy positions into a coherent vision, a shortcoming that crystallized with his statement that he voted for Iraq war funding before he voted against it." Fair criticism?

Kerry: Well, as I said in the debate with the president, I made a mistake in the way that I talked about the war, but the president made a mistake in going to war. Now, which is worse? I could have done a better job in the campaign explaining what I meant. I voted against it because I believed we should pay for it, and because they didn't have a plan. And our mistake was one of a campaign strategy of not going out and explaining that. I voted out of principle, and I will continue to vote out of principle.

I have a short plan for America, Tim, and I--you know, it's called, "Tell the truth, fire the incompetents, get out of Iraq***, have health care for all Americans." These are pretty simple messages, and they're worth fighting for today.

Wow, it's hard to believe everyone voted against this guy! He should definitely run in 2008."

I just had this weird Jason Leopold moment...I had forgotten that is was Leopold who was the author of the breathless story about the classified document that proved some faulty procedure (can't remember exactly what) about the Bush Admin and something to do with 9-11 ...

anyways the left-o-sphere went a little nutso over it and and a pretty respected right side blogger (can't remember who) sat down to read the doc, as he was reading through he agreed that some of the content could be breathless...until he came upon the document date and it was in Dec. 2000 and then time stamped the same .... he realized the left and apparently Leopold, couldn't do math because Bush didn't take office until Jan. 2001...he also did an update that he should have known better and considered the source (Leopold, truthout)

Does anyone recall this and the blogger who recorded this hilarious moment?

After seeing Kerry on MTP I am amazed so many people ended up voting for him in 2004. The more he talks the less sense he makes. Joe Wilson has the same problem and leaves the same impression. Its too much of a bad thing.

Hope you all read Vanderleun's "The Hamlet Men" on Kerry and the Dems. Brilliant.

and Vasko Kohlmayer also contributed a marvelous post to American Thinker today after he saw the MTP Kerry appearance.

Taranto also rocked today on
Fukayama and "propaganda".

Getting hard to keep track of all the tracks lately.

And on CNN and MSNBC they keep pointing out all the American flags at the demos today. Only Fox makes sure you know that the organizers passed them out and told them not to fly the Mexican flags. However, Lou Dobbs pointed out that many of the American Flags
were being flown upsidedown.

Hi. I'm here to tell all of you that I so enjoy reading these lies about me. It's really great to see that I have all of you wound up. I LOVE IT! I plan on continuing to report this story EVERY DAY. So thanks for givng me great publicity. I especially love Clarice Feldman. She's so crazy insane and funny! Thank you Clarice! Say something else funny!

By the way, I wrote a book called NEWS JUNKIE and I ADMIT that I am a recovering drug addict and that I have a felony for grand theft. Feel free to order it on Amazon. So as you can see I've outed myself. Nothing said here really affects me since I put all of the dirt out there already. But again, thanks!

He couldn't really tell anyone else about it, but it was clearly written in the leaves at the bottom of his cup three distinct times. The meaning of all became clear when .....hey, I just had a thought. I'll bet Joe thought Saddam had nuclear WMD, but also knew about the yellow cake papers way back in Jan and Feb of '03 when he was opposing the war on grounds that Saddam would use his Bio ancd Chem WMD on our troops. He could alert Levin, then when none were found, swing into action with his lie. He probably did hope to preserve his or at least Val's anonymity, but when it started to fall apart in June, and he smelt the lure of fame, he just drove on recklessly and plamed the resulting wreck on the White House. A kamikaze mission really; Joe lives through the need for the disloyal opposition to preserve his meme. No wonder he looks, acts, and talks like a zombie. Pity the children.
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The disjunct between his public persona and his figure as public speaker is too hard to sustain. Surely, he needs a lawyer. The disjunct between his meme and reality in Iraq is increasingly hard to sustain. The Dems need a politician.
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